I did not really mean to offend any of the NetWare supporters. In fact I am one of them. Some replies are though due and I think some comments made are not justified. We are actually the ones who do not save on hardware nor we buy cheap. It is not worth it. One of the drives was new but not bought cheaply, nor we span volumes. We also bought a few years ago top of the range RAID system, still not on the cheap, which had the controller failing so often, I was left every time with nothing. After a few repairs (still not on the cheap) I ditched the whole thing. I am sure I might have been very unlucky. My issue was just to understand the cause of it so that it would not happen again. If it is a patch I will repach, if it is hardware I replace. It is just sometimes depressing spending your nights dealing with issues which might be caused by poor software writing. I am though sorry to say I have not been the only one having disasters happening for this. And it happens to NetWare too, I am afraid. As to hardware running on Windows, we actually do. All we have are Dell servers (not cheap ones), both for NetWare and for Windows. We use Windows server just for some applications though as those are not compatible with NetWare. Again, I would not turn my NetWare server into a Windows under any circumstance. For the reason we know, although our servers have run rather happily for years (we obviously do not have Exchange).
As to the real pool issue, it was sudden, 9 am in the morning. No-one tampered with it. However I might have an answer to it, as I managed to find some time to check the server properly after the immediate emergency of recovering the data to the backup server I have.
One of the drives is not active anymore. If that failed and the partitions of the pools which disappeared were ONLY on the failing one, the system would have retained SYS (which did not have any partitions on the failing drive) but all the other pools on the other drives would have gone. I logged in to refer about my findings, and it is just fair. This is a supposition, but I think a pretty plausible one. Correct me if I am wrong.
All our data has been recovered through backup. I have a good backup procedure and it has worked until now.
Sorry again if I have upset anyone, there was no intention, just tiredness. Understanding the real cause of an issue is to me important, only because of prevention (if this is possible) Having a family and being pregnant probably does not help filing miserable occasionally especially on such occasions.
Thanks for all the help. I mean it.